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In a November 27, 1998, op-ed piece in Science , J. Thomas Ratchford, who had served as Associate Director for Policy and International Affairs under Bromley, virtually washed his hands of the State Department:

Elegant organizational constructs and unfunded legislative mandates for the Department of State cannot work. The commonsense approach is to give the federal research and development (R&D) agencies the policy direction and resources to do for State much of what it has not been able to do for itself. Only this will catalyze the necessary two-way interchange between science and engineering on the one hand and foreign-policy development on the other. J. Thomas Ratchford, “Science and Government: Put Science and Technology Back into Foreign Policy,” Science (November 27, 1988), 1650-51.

At the time, a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences was already considering recommendations to strengthen the links between science and technology and U.S. diplomacy. Apparently, the increasingly vocal outrage among experts about the virtual elimination of science and technology from American foreign policy had caught the attention of Secretary of State Madeline Albright. In April 1998, she asked NAS to prepare a report on specific means through which the links between science and technology and international diplomacy could be restored and strengthened. David Malakoff, “Diplomacy: Gibbons Joins Effort to Boost Science at State,” Science (October 15, 1999), 391-92. The NAS panel, chaired by Robert Frosch, a research fellow at Harvard University, stated bluntly: “Ironically, as the world becomes more technologically interdependent, the trend at the State Department has been to downplay science and technical expertise.” He advised Albright “to articulate and implement a policy that calls for greater attention to [science] dimensions of foreign policy throughout the department.” Ibid.

The panel recommended that the number of science counselors posted in U.S. embassies be increased to at least twenty-five, and that the Secretary of State should appoint a Science Advisor. Gibbons agreed to come out of retirement to serve as interim Science Adviser to the Secretary of State until Norman Neureiter, a retired industrial chemist who had served as science counselor in several Eastern European capitals earlier in his career, assumed the post in November 2003.

Even though Albright (and, to a lesser extent, her successors) sought to follow the NAS panel’s recommendation, the uses of science and technology made by the State Department as tools of international diplomacy remain problematic. Although the number of science counselors has increased, they were rechristened as Counselors for Science, Technology, Environment, and Health, thus increasing their responsibilities without providing them with the requisite additional staff to cope with them. Additionally, most of these counselors are ill-equipped by virtue of their backgrounds to serve effectively. While most countries appoint science counselors to their foreign embassies by detailing individuals from R&D ministries, the State Department selects career diplomats, few of whom have any scientific training. A principal qualification for appointment seems to have been experience serving in a U.S. diplomatic mission in the given country. The appointees’ lack of a professional science or technology background tends to impede their effectiveness.

Assessment

Near the end of Clinton’s term, an article in Science concluded that his administration deserved relatively high marks with respect to science policy. David Malakoff, “Science Policy: Clinton’s Science Legacy: Ending on a High Note,” Science (December 22, 2000), 2234-36. “Such praise, Washington policy watchers say, illustrates how the science community has warmed to what many originally perceived to be at best his ambivalence about science policy.” Clinton was credited for significant increases in budgets for the federal government’s principal science and technology agencies and for beating back attempts by the Republican majority in Congress to weaken his R&D budgets.

President Clinton tries out the White House website designed by OSTP staff. Courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library.

However, not all science policy experts gave the Clinton administration high marks. A September 2000 meeting convened by the AAAS and the Center for the Study of the Presidency gave high marks to Gibbons and Lane, but faulted Clinton for not using PCAST as effectively as he might have, and was skeptical about whether the roles of science and technology in international affairs had really been strengthened under him.

These criticisms, however, were relatively mild. Had the same participants in that September 2000 meeting been reassembled eight years later, their criticisms of the second Bush presidency (2001-09) would likely have been considerably harsher.

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Source:  OpenStax, A history of federal science policy from the new deal to the present. OpenStax CNX. Jun 26, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11210/1.2
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